Baudrillard and Simulated Reality in 2017

For this, I was assigned to read and analyze an excerpt of postmodernist writer and theorist Jean Baudrillard's writings on simulacra. I then had to summarize his theory and find a relevant argument to make about them.

Admittedly, this was a difficult read, since Baudrillard's points aren't always entirely clear. Still, I found his points about simulations and reality to be fairly relevant in 2017. Below I explain why.

The Walt Disney Corporation: Providing Entertainment with Messages

The point to this was simple: study a media agency, find a point about it and argue that point. It seemed a daunting challenge until I thought of Walt Disney and The Walt Disney Company.

Before reading, I want to emphasize the point I aimed to make here: I am not condoning the actions of The Walt Disney Corporation or Disney himself that potentially speak to corruption, greed or other unfavorable aspects. The point I strove to make is that I believe that Walt Disney and The Walt Disney Company, for all of their failings and flaws, are a fundamentally good and beneficial organization.

I chose this angle because I felt I related to Walt Disney as a storyteller. As I write below, Disney never aimed to underestimate his audience's intelligence, no matter how childish his works may have come off as. He also so little reason to hide the ugly nature of the world from the children viewing his films. Since one of my aims is to write fiction, I understand and can relate to this.

It was from that angle that I decided I wanted to write about Disney in a positive way, looking for the inherent good in the apparent ugliness.

A Short Analysis of Malcom F**king Tucker

To most people, Peter Capaldi is best known for the Twelfth Doctor on BBC's Doctor Who. Before that, he'd starred in handful of other productions, in particular as John Frobisher in Torchwood: Children of Earth, Cardinal Richelieu in The Musketeers, and as the ironically named W.H.O. Doctor in World War Z.

Before all of that, though, he was Malcolm Tucker, the profane head of the Department of Social Affairs in The Thick of It, a political satire/drama series. Below is a short analysis I wrote of the man as a leader and a character.

Opinion: Why Attacking Net Neutrality is a Precursor to State-Run News

Updated 8/23/2017

While I’ve been signing a number of petitions to make my opinions known about political matters over the past few months, I very rarely comment on them.

However, with this one, I felt a special connection and an obligation to post my thoughts. Below is what I said and why.

Saw VI: Mixing Political Commentary & Horror

Background

For this assignment - from an American Horror course, I was instructed to pick a horror film and analyze how it approaches a political or social topic. That was the core idea of the assignment, though I was largely limited to analyzing the film according to references in notes and material covered in course discussions.

I lacked a wide array of horror films with an explicit focus in politics. The few films I noted with a subject matter that involved politics or social topics basically consisted of The Omen (original series and remake) and Day of the Dead (original, 1985). However, with healthcare being a major subject in recent months, I decided on Saw VI, which uses healthcare as a plot point

The following is my written analysis, albeit highly edited and, in my mind, improved based on my own feelings and feedback after I submitted it*.

Characterization in Louise Erdrich’s Indian Boarding School – The Runaways

I recently rediscovered a few older assignments from my time at HACC. One of these is an analysis I wrote about characterization for a short story in my Fall 2014 Introduction to Literature course.

I wrote this analysis as the second part of a two-part assignment studying the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The first part involved a slideshow presentation with a partner with information about the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

I have little to add beyond the fact that little, if anything, has been added or edited from this posting.

Genres: Few, Many & More

Background

This is an early assignment I wrote while at HACC for a media studies class in 2015. The instruction was very much, "Pick a topic from a list of topics and write about it; include references to conglomeration, convergence and how advances in technology have affected it."

From this list, I selected a topic about genres. I first asked, "What can I write about this that would make it unique or worth reading?" Eventually I narrowed down on an angle: how genres have evolved over time and how they can divide in to sub-genres, and those sub-genres can be divided, and so on.

I wasn't planning to post this at all, but after one of my classes studied genres and narratives, I decided to revisit this and post it.